For many, he embodies the ideal type of melancholic Schnitzler actor – an ability that Miguel Herz-Kestranek has demonstrated for many years at the Reichenau Festival. The writing mime, whose most recent work “Gedankenflügge. Aphorismen” was published last autumn, is just as active on television as he is at readings and as a podcast guest. On Monday (April 3rd) he celebrates his 75th birthday.
“Nationalists wrap explosives / with their birth certificates,” the volume says, or “Being a Jew is never a matter of course.” Herz-Kestranek, who was born on April 3, 1948 in St. Gallen in Switzerland, also dealt with his Jewish origins in his 2011 book “Frau von Pollak: oder How my father told Jewish jokes”. He spent his childhood on Lake Wolfgang and came to Vienna, his father’s hometown, at the age of 20, where he completed his acting training at the Max Reinhardt Seminar. Following this, the artist was a member of the ensemble at the Burgtheater and the Theater in der Josefstadt, among other things, and had engagements at the Vienna Volkstheater and the Salzburg Festival. Herz-Kestranek has worked as a freelance actor since 1980.
On stage, the mime made a name for himself primarily as a Schnitzler actor. Around 1990 he played “Anatol” at the Josefstadt, directed by Otto Schenk. Over time, however, Herz-Kestranek’s career shifted more and more from the theater to television, where he was able to celebrate his first success in the early 1980s in the Jörg Mauthe series “Family Merian” as Magister Liguster. Other roles, including as Commissioner Ullmann in “Tatort” and as a villain in series such as “Klinik unter Palmen” or in “Kommissar Rex” followed.
A special preference of Herz-Kestranek is the Viennese coffee house literature of the turn of the last century. As part of his reading tours, he was heard in the USA and Israel with texts by Peter Altenberg, Alfred Polgar and Egon Friedell. In his successful program “Laughing cakes with notes”, the actor also presented himself as a chansonnier.
Again and again, Miguel Herz-Kestranek, who has a daughter with his partner and fellow actor Dorothea Parton, is also active as an author and editor. In 1997 the artist published letters from his father Stefan, entitled “…so I only have myself”, which he had written during his emigration to Latin America after fleeing from the National Socialists. In addition to collecting and writing rhymes, polemics and Christmas stories, he also worked as an editor, for example of Austrian Exillyrik.
Herz-Kestranek was also always involved in socio-political matters: in 1993 he founded the Austrian Association of Film Actors, of which he has been Honorary President since 2003. He was Vice-President of the local PEN Club and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance. He has been Vice President of the Austrian Society for Exile Research since 2008, and in 2012 he was a founding member of the Citizens’ Forum Europe 2020. For his achievements he was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art (2000) and the Grand Decoration of Honor for Services to the Province of Lower Austria ( 2013) awarded.
In 2021, the Austrian National Library (ÖNB) acquired the remaining parts of the written family estate of the Austrian industrialist families Herz and Kestranek. Since 2018, the actor’s estate “to a large extent through donations” had entered the ÖNB in stages. It now includes more than 10,000 papers and documents.